Despite having a basic theme and a “basic” shape, you can build anything from each Tegu Travel Pal set.
Another Travel Pal Hummingbird Ficture
Magna-Tiles Working Trucks
What’s inside the kit – 4 bases with wheels, 2 trailers with 2 wheels, parts to build a concrete mixer, bulldozer, tractor, garbage truck. There are cabins for cars and trucks. There are flashing lights, there are front attachments with headlights, which children insist on calling eyes. The photo shows all the parts of this set. The magnets hold the parts well, but when you move the car with a trailer, it’s better to support the trailer with your hand.
Flowers – DIY Braid Mosaic
Flowers made from the homemade fabric pieces. Pieces are about an inch long each.
The Omnibus
A carriage which Arisha (3 years and 10 months old) made all by herself.
Quercetti Gears Tower
Here’s a tower with gears, not yet fully decorated. We took a special photo to make it clear what it looks like without the studs. We also bought a Quercetti set with a motor (bottom left, yellow in color with two red buttons), the entire tower rotates, both manually and by motor.
These gears by Quercetti has all the essential thing you’d desire in a gear system. Firstly, their construction quality is top-notch, and the pieces have robust and solid design. The set also has a seamless gear interface, so they interlock securely. With this reliable connections and sturdy pieces, the set allows you to build machines that can perform real work.
The set includes several base plates that fit together like puzzle pieces. Nearly half the time these are in use at our house, kids made colorful boxes from them. So, they’re not just basic pieces but are interesting decorations in their own. The second set of pieces has support structures, which are tubes and joints that interlock to create sturdy poles. These pieces come in a consistent size, without the frustration of dealing with components at slightly different heights, a problem we’ve encountered with other sets in the past. The support connects are sturdy, so that the structures stay intact once they’re built.
In addition to the gears, this set also comes with attachments like chains and rubber bands. You can use them to connect groups of gears that would otherwise be separate. Also, you can use them with other toys and building sets.
K’NEX Kid Farmin’ Friends Set – Crafts
This K’Nex set is relatively small one, with 65 pieces. Along with the usual rods and flakes, it has many long, flexible rod pieces, and some decorative pieces like hats or beak-like pieces.
K’Nex Airplane
We purchased K’Nex big building set recently and still haven’t really mastered it. I thought about purchasing it for a very long time. It looked really similar to Lego Technic, and I thought that my son wouldn’t play with it. In the end, we bought 2 complex sets for our 12-year-old son and a simple set for our 5-year-old daughter. The set turned out to be interesting, my daughters liked it.
The K’Nex construction set was invented by Joel Glickman, who, while bored at a party, twirled cocktail straws in his hands and tried to connect them in different ways. This is how he got the idea of the set – flexible sticks and their possible rigid connections. The set first appeared in 1993 in the USA. You can read about the features of the parts on Wikipedia. Since 2001, the manufacturer added the Lego-type parts in the construction set for greater variability in designs, especially with space themes. This was connected to the release by Lego of the Star Wars series. You can check the entire variety of K’Nex for children aged 2 years and older on the K’Nex website.
We made this craft from K’Nex pieces of regular size, because K’Nex big building set don’t have mini pieces. All mini pieces we have come from other sets.
Quercetti Kaleido Gears Piece Types
These are different types of pieces Kaleido Gears pieces by Querccetti has. Of course, there are many pieces – the picture just shows the piece variety.
This Kaleido Gears set by Quercetti has all the essential things you’d desire in a gear system. Firstly, their construction quality is top-notch, and the pieces have a robust and solid design. The set also has a seamless gear interface, so they interlock securely. With these reliable connections and sturdy pieces, the set allows you to build machines that can perform real work.
The set includes several base plates that fit together like puzzle pieces. Sadly, this set has no poles or pillars, you make a basic construction from the puzzle pieces only. You can also build 3D structures with these pieces, like boxes or buildings. There are also no bands or chains, so this set has fewer building options than the other Quercetti gear sets.
The gears, however, are great – they have different sizes, colors, and ornaments, and they move! Together, they create very bright and flashy crafts, hence the set’s name. It also includes the axis pieces and a crank to move the gears. This set is great for explaining basic physics to the children – they will learn the basics of gear connections without any trouble. Since the kit mostly has big, colorful parts, the recommended age is 3-12 years.
X And Y
A page from the manual showing X and Y pieces together.
Butterfly On A Basket
Yet another thing from a building tube set.
Building straws are a popular and unusual type of building set. These sets include long, hollow flexible tubes that connect to each other at their ends. Since the tubes themselves have no special connecting devices, the set also includes special connecting parts. These parts are very small hard and rigid, and they have long pins that you can insert into the straws. The number and the positions of these pins can vary, so different connectors hold the straws’ ends at different angles. Because each tube is flexible, this simple principle allows you to assemble countless shapes and crafts from just one building set.
These sets are very unusual because they allow you to create any geometrical form you want and use the bent lines. The final craft will always be hollow, lightweight, and almost symbolic. However, you will still recognize these shapes, and they look more detailed and solid if they have more straws. Also, the straws are soft, so you can shorten them with a pair of common scissors if you need to. Sadly, there is no way to fix the straw after it was cut. Since the long straws bend more smoothly than the short straws connected in a row, the long ones are very valuable in these sets. So you have to be careful if you want to cut something.
